How to concentrate on boring Critical Reading passages

by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 6, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)

As pretty much anyone with more than five minutes of SAT prep experience knows, Critical Reading passages are not exactly chosen for their phenomenal entertainment value. Ecotourism? Snooze. Whale play? Who cares. Copepods? Even I had to force myself to stay awake for that one. (Incidentally, when I was writing lots of reading material, I used a couple of passages that were so boring I actually had trouble mustering sufficient focus to write questions about them! Having to answer the questions may be bad, but I can assure you that writing them can be far, far more excruciating.)

So yes, while occasionally you’ll stumble across a passage on a topic that holds your interest for more than, say, a second-and-a-half, the majority of the time that just won’t be the case. Unfortunately, you still have to deal with the questions, regardless of how much of the passage you’ve tuned out, and if you spend too much time reading and re-reading, desperately trying to absorb everything that’s going on, you’ll already be behind time-wise when you start the questions. Besides, it doesn’t matter how much time you spend reading if you’re not really absorbing anything.

So what’s the solution? Stop trying to understand everything (at least for the first read-through) and just focus on something else: finding the main idea, the tone, and the stuff that the author indicates is important (explanations, italics, anything with the words “important” or the “the goal,” “the point,” etc.). If you actively look for something as you read, it’s a whole lot harder to tune out as you go through the process.

As I’ve written about before, the content of most Critical Reading passages is in some ways deeply irrelevant — that is, provided that you can grasp the basics, it doesn’t really matter what the author happens to be saying, only how s/he structures the argument. If you start reading for function, content becomes secondary.

So say you’re trying to slog through that awful passage about copepods (or something equally hideous), stop reading carefully as soon as you figure out what the basic idea is, and just start worrying about the role that each new paragraph plays — and that’s information you can get in the first couple of sentences. If you see “for example” or “for instance,” that means that the paragraph is pretty much going to support an idea; if you see “however,” or “despite,” that’s a pretty good indicator that the rest of the paragraph is going to refute an idea. Then you can just skim through the rest of it to make sure nothing new and important gets introduced.

If it helps you to do so, you can also write something like “support” or “refute” or “explain” next to the paragraph, just to keep yourself paying attention and give you an outline of the argument. Furthermore, when you get a question about why the author included a particular piece of information in that paragraph, all you’ll have to do is look at your note: if the point of the paragraph is to support, chances are the right answer will start with a positive word; if the point of the paragraph is to disagree, chances are it’ll start with a negative word. It won’t matter if you haven’t gotten every last detail — you’ll have the bit picture, which you can use to make a reasonable guess, and on the SAT that’s what really counts.

Will this give you the answer to every question? Of course not. I’m simplifying a bit here. But you might be surprised at how often working this way 1) keeps you focused, and 2) gets you close to the right answer, even if you’re not really certain you understood everything you read.

Don’t guess, figure it out

by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 22, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)

I’m not opposed to guessing on the SAT. Really I’m not. If you’re actually taking the test, find yourself stuck between two answers, and have a really strong sense that it might be one of them, I generally say to go for it. In my experience, most people have pretty decent instincts, and even if they can’t always put their finger on just why the answer is the answer, their gut instincts usually turns out to be right. In those cases, not guessing is more of a problem.

What I’m opposed to is the notion that the SAT should be treated like some sort of guessing game; that just because there are multiple answers, it shouldn’t be necessary to actually learn how to answer the questions; and that SAT prep should primarily consist of learning how to eliminate answers and play the odds, hoping that if you can get rid of a couple of answers, you’ll get lucky enough to hit the right one often enough to get you a decent score.

The problem with that approach is that it fails to recognize the relationship between question and answer. And as I’ve said before, the presence of multiple answer choices doesn’t make the right answer any less right, or the process of actually learning how to answer the questions any less necessary.

The highest scorers, the ones who score 750 and above, aren’t the best guessers — they’re the ones who know how to figure out the answers for real. In order to accept that idea in regard to Critical Reading, however, you must first accept that the answers aren’t simply a matter of opinion and that there is actually a concrete, logical process that one can employ in order to arrive at the correct one. Once you’ve done that, you’re on your way.

So what this boils down to is one very simple piece of advice: when you’re studying for the SAT and come across a question you’re unsure of how to answer, don’t guess! Stop timing yourself, forget about finishing the section, and try to work through the question.

Experiment — if one approach doesn’t work, try something else. If you’re doing reading, keep going back and forth between the passage and the question. Someone recently sent me one of the hardest CR questions I’ve ever seen, and I must have gone back and forth about twenty times, no exaggeration. No matter how frustrated I got, I kept reminding myself to stick to the process, and eventually I arrived at the answer.

One thing I have to occasionally remind my students of is that I’m not some sort of magician when it comes to the SAT. Even though I can often answer questions almost instantaneously, I’m still going through the entire process of figuring out exactly what the question is asking, going back to the text, summing up the answer in my own words, and writing it down — I’m just doing it really fast. But I almost never skip steps, and when I do, I sometimes get questions wrong (at which point I hold myself up as an example of why you should never skip steps). Occasionally, I also start from faulty premises and work through an entire question, only to discover that the answer I’ve come up with isn’t there. At that point, I start all over by reevaluating my initial assumption, and I usually make my students watch me rework the question from scratch, just to show them that sometimes there actually isn’t a shortcut.

But regardless, chances are, any form of logic you apply to the question will get you somewhere. The SAT is in part designed to test whether you can use the knowledge you do have to deduce the answers to material that is in all likelihood unfamiliar. The College Board doesn’t necessary expect you to have memorized the definition of “multifarious,” but they do expect you to be able to figure out that “multi” means “many” and make an educated guess based on that knowledge. The bottom line is that you need to practice developing the idea that the SAT isn’t about guessing. When you don’t see the answer immediately, you’re far better served by stopping and thinking the question through carefully and methodically than by leaping to guess. If you have to spend half an hour on a single question, fine. You’ll get faster eventually. All that counts is that you learn something process-related that you can apply to working through other questions in the future. Otherwise, to invoke the old cliché, you’re just spinning your wheels.

Be as literal as you possibly can

by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 20, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)

Occasionally, ETS comes out with a question that is so utterly diabolical in its simplicity that I have to give them major kudos for it. Debbie Stier sent me this question, and when I first looked at it, I was puzzled for a moment, but when the answer hit me, I felt obliged to write about it. It’s one of the best illustrations I’ve ever seen of just how absolutely and completely literal it is necessary to be when doing SAT Critical Reading questions.

I really cannot emphasize this point enough: in order to understand anything about the role a detail or piece of information plays within the context of a passage, you must first try to understand what is says as precisely as possible. If you go even a centimeter beyond what the author says, you can easily fall into the realm of speculation and miss things that are right under your nose.

Here goes:

When we came home, Aunt Sylvie would certainly be home, too, enjoying the evening, for so she described her habit of sitting in the dark. Evening was part of her special time of day. She gave the word three syllables, and indeed I think (5) she liked it so well for its tendency to smooth, to soften. She seemed to dislike the disequilibrium of counterpoising a roomful of light against a world full of darkness. Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship’s cabin. She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude.

9. The reference to Aunt Sylvie’s pronunciation in line 4 serves to

(A) capture a distinctive regional dialect
(B) highlight a double meaning of a word
(C) provide an ominous foreshadowing
(D) underscore a particular misconception
(E) give evidence of a contrary personality

First, let’s examine some traps that someone could easily fall into: (A) can be eliminated pretty easily because it’s completely outside the scope of the passage, but (C) seems like it might be able to work. After all, darkness is usually a bad thing in books, and the passage is about darkness, so maybe the author is suggesting that something bad is going to happen.

(D) also seems vaguely plausible. It seems kind of weird that someone would want to sit in the dark, and so that’s sort of like a misconception.

(E) seems like it could work for the same reason. Most people don’t want to sit in the dark, and so someone who wants to do so must be contrary, right?

But here’s how you actually solve it:

Remember the whole reading word-by-by word thing? This is how it works, and I hope the answer to this question illustrates just how absolutely necessary it is.

What does the author say about Aunt Sylvie’s pronunciation in line 4? That she gave the word “evening” three syllables: e-ven-ing. That’s it, the only information we have to go on, so that’s the only information we can use to answer the question.

Now, literally, “evening” of course means “the time when it gets dark out,” but when used as a verb, it means “to make even,” literally “to smooth” (as the author states in line 5) or to remove inconsistencies from a surface. In other words, the word “evening” has two meanings, and the author calls attention to Aunt Sylvie’s pronunciation in order to call attention to (=highlight) that fact.

The answer must therefore be (B).

Describing content vs. summarizing arguments

by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 16, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)

One of the things I’ve noticed recently is that when they first start working with me, a lot of my students aren’t quite clear on the difference between describing the content of a passage and summarizing the argument it contains. Since the ability to summarize arguments quickly, lucidly, and effectively is perhaps the the skill that is most crucial for success on the Critical Reading portion of the SAT, this is a serious problem. Regardless, once a student has finished reading their first passage, the initial conversation usually goes something like this:

Me: So now I want you to sum up the author’s argument in your own words. What’s the basic point that he or she is trying to make here?

Student: Well, the author talks about x… and then he sort of mentions y…oh yeah, and then there was this thing that he said about z that I didn’t really get.

At which point I explain that I’m not interested in hearing a play-by-play recount of what the author says, but rather a condensed version of the main argument he or she is making. I’ve now gotten so many puzzled looks at that statement that I think I’m just going to nix the question completely and start by explaining the difference.

Most of my students pick it up pretty quickly after I give them some examples and walk them through the steps a couple of times; however, the fact that I seem to be having this conversation repeatedly suggests a couple of thing to me. First, it suggests that schools (at least the ones my students come from) do not ever explicitly teach students the difference between summarizing and arguing. It also suggests that even if the distinction has been covered at some point, they’ve never been asked to apply it in any meaningful way.

Incidentally, this weakness is not limited to high school students; I’ve also encountered it with GRE and GMAT students. Perhaps it’s one of those skills that teachers assume students will pick up along the way. Or perhaps that’s the sort of test prepp-y trick they pride themselves on avoiding (which is shame because it’s really not about test prep). More likely, though, it simply doesn’t ever occur to them that it needs to be taught. After all, they understand the difference. (To any teachers who may be reading this, please don’t take offense; I’m just describing what I experience.) Unfortunately, however, there is a very important distinction between giving a description of content and giving a summary of an argument, and on the SAT, not knowing the difference can cost you literally hundreds of points.

Describing Content = recounting the information presented in the text without necessarily distinguishing between main points and supporting evidence and/or counter-arguments. The goal is simply to relate what is being said, often in a very concrete “first x, then y, and finally z” form.

Summarizing an Argument = identifying the essential point that the author wants to convey and eliminating any superfluous detail. The goal is not to cover all of the information presented or to relate it in the sequence it appears in the passage, but rather to pinpoint the overarching idea that determines the content (supporting details, potential counter-arguments, etc.) of the passage. Summarizing an argument requires you to make a leap from concrete to abstract because you must move beyond simply recounting the information presented to recognizing which parts of it are of primary vs. secondary importance. Let’s look at an example. I’m going to use the passage from yesterday’s post about transitions — the version with the transitions, of course! My apologies for making you read it again, but hey, no one ever said that SAT passages were chosen for their entertainment value. Besides, there are many, many ways to read any given piece of text. But that’s something I’m not going to get into now. Passage

The Panama Canal illustrates the principle that the economist Albert O. Hirschman has called the Hiding Hand. People begin many enterprises because they don’t realize how difficult they actually are, yet respond with ingenuity that lets them overcome the unexpected, as the Apollo program’s engineers and astronauts were later to do. The testimony in [the documentary] Panama Canal also shows the power of the heroic image of technology in the early twentieth century. It was felt even by the exploited laborers, who still shared the nineteenth century’s stoic approach to industrial risk. Three percent of white American workers and nearly 14 percent of West Indians died. Despite improvements in sanitation, it was “a harsh nightmare,” the grandson of one of those workers declares, but he also recalls the pride of his grandfather in participating in one of the world’s great wonders. In fact, many returnees were inspired by their achievement to join movements for greater economic and political equality in the 1920s and 1930s, the roots of the decolonization movement.

Content Description (more or less what I hear when I ask someone to summarize): So, um, the author talks about this guy Albert O. Hirschman’s “hiding hand” idea, which I think, like, basically says that people don’t know how difficult things are when they start but then they find out and overcome them. And then he talks about this documentary called Panama Canal, which showed like about how technology was important in the early 20th century, and how workers were exploited and how awful conditions were for them while they were working. He mentions a guy whose grandfather worked on the Panama Canal, and he says that his grandfather said that it was really bad and stuff… Oh yeah, and then there was something about, uh, decolonization I think, but I don’t know if I really got that.

Notice the how vague this version is. It doesn’t really distinguish between primary and secondary information; everything gets mushed in together. If this were an SAT passage, the summary would give us zero help in terms of figuring out the main point.

Argument Summary (as I would put it): Workers faced immense obstacles and terrible conditions while working on the Panama Canal but persevered and were inspired to begin decolonization process.

Notice how this version doesn’t try to pack in a lot of information — it just hits the big theme.

Argument Summary in condensed SAT terms: PC workers survived awful conditions — > decolonization

Now notice how this version cuts out absolutely everything except the absolute total utter bare essentials. It doesn’t even attempt to incorporate any sort of detail or anything beyond the main focus of the passage and (awful conditions during the building of the Panama Canal) and its result (the “so what?”, the part that tells us why the main focus of the passage is important). If we were to treat this as a short SAT passage, that effect (it set off the decolonization process) would be our focus. It is mentioned in the last sentence, and the last sentence is where the main point usually is. So in six words and an arrow, we’ve managed to capture the essential information — information that we will almost certainly need to answer at least one of the questions.